Starting your research can be a daunting task. As you complete readings and other activities for your course, remember those topics that interested you most or left you asking the most questions. These topics and questions can be the foundation for your research projects.

This guide will provide information about finding resources, evaluating them, and using them appropriately for your course assignments. 

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need research assistance as you progress through the semester using the information in my profile box on the Home page of this guide.

Keywords are the terms you use to search in the Libraries' databases. They distill your complex topic down into its most basic elements. You keywords should not be a sentence. 

Keep in mind that you can try many different keywords and can always look for new ones -- when you find articles, books, or other resources, see what keywords the database uses to describe the article. If you're stuck, these new keywords can help you find more information. 

If you are finding you get too many results (thousands) you may want to try adding a few more keywords to make your search more specific to a country, organization, or time period. If you are not getting any results or only getting a handful of results, try using a fewer keywords, or try some broader terms.

Use Quotation Marks to search for short phrases.

For example: "Miranda rights"

The use of the quotation marks will prevent the database from searching for these words separately. This way, you will avoid results where "Miranda" is used in one paragraph (or perhaps is an author's name) and "rights" is used a few paragraphs later, but they are not used together as a phrase. Instead, all results will contain the phrase Miranda Rights. 

When using quotation marks, it's important that you spell your terms correctly and that you keep the words inside the quotation marks to a minimum -- the database will search for exactly what you've typed as you've typed it. 

You can also use Boolean Operators like AND, OR, or NOT to broaden or narrow your search results. (Make sure that the AND, OR, or NOT operator are in all caps.)

For example:

• police AND "excessive force"
  • Results would include any items that mention BOTH police and excessive force
• "Miranda Rights" OR "Miranda Warning"
  • Results would include any items that mention Miranda rights or Miranda warning, but not necessarily both. This is a broader search than an AND search. It's useful if there are terms that might be used somewhat interchangeably, like Miranda rights and Miranda warning. You would find more results with this kind of search, but they may be less relevant to your topic, depending on your topic.
• "deadly force" NOT "excessive force"
  • Results would include any items that mention "deadly force", but do not mention "excessive force". NOT searches are helpful if there is a similar but unrelated topic to your search. Using NOT can help you cut down on the number of irrelevant results, but sometimes it can be too narrow.